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		<title>The laptop didn&apos;t work out &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2018/01-January/18.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>The laptop didn&apos;t work out</h1>
			<p>Day 01048: <time>Thursday, 2018 January 18</time></p>
		</header>
<section id="dental">
	<h2>The dental work continues</h2>
	<p>
		From the sounds of it, my biggest cavity, one in the back, wasn&apos;t on record.
		Apparently, only my front one was scheduled to be filled.
		I&apos;d been looking forward to having both filled today and being done with the dental work for a while.
		No such luck, but more on that in a bit.
		Anyway, I pointed out right away that there were two cavities, not one, and they got a radiograph of the back cavity.
		It seems it&apos;s progressed too far though.
		The tooth can either have a root canal or be extracted, and my insurance won&apos;t cover a root canal.
		Lovely.
		So I need to have another tooth extracted.
		This time, the tooth is in the upper back, so there&apos;s the risk that ripping it out will tear a hole into my sinuses, according to the consent form they had me sign.
	</p>
	<p>
		The dentist offered to change plans and perform the extraction during this appointment, but I really wasn&apos;t up for another extraction today.
		Extractions are bad enough when you know they&apos;re going to happen, but I&apos;m not emotionally strong enough to deal with them when they&apos;re just dropped on me like this.
		I think I came up with a good enough excuse to put it off, and in fact, putting it off is the smarter option, but underneath it all, it was still an excuse.
		Anyway, if they extracted the tooth, they said they&apos;d only maybe be able to perform the drill and fill too.
		It depends on how my body was doing afterwards.
		The hole in my front tooth is interfering with my eating, while the back one&apos;s only a nuisance.
		More importantly, the back tooth cannot be saved, while the front one probably can.
		The front one needs to be taken care of before it gets worse.
	</p>
	<p>
		Some work was done on the front tooth, but it sounds like there&apos;s some healing the tooth may or may not do, and depending on that, the tooth may need to either be extracted as well or have a root canal.
		Being a front tooth, the insurance will cover a root canal, as they have different policies for front teeth.
		In other words, they&apos;re willing to have me go through the horror of an extraction, they just don&apos;t want to harm my appearance.
		It&apos;s lovely (pun intended) where their priorities lie.
		In any case, the filling on the front tooth is temporary and will need to be replaced with a permanent one if the healing goes well.
		I&apos;m not overly happy with how it came out; it has sharp edges on one side.
		But as it&apos;s not meant to be the permanent filling, I imagine more care will be put in on the new one.
		Additionally, the dentist patched up the back tooth that will be extracted later, wanting to keep stuff out of the hole.
		I&apos;m much happier with how that filling came out; it&apos;s too bad it&apos;ll be removed with the tooth.
		This also will allow that extraction to be postponed a bit longer.
		Speaking of which ...
	</p>
	<p>
		It seems I have more cavities than I realised.
		There are a couple small ones that&apos;ll need to be patched on the twenty-ninth.
		I imagine the appointment after that will deal with the front tooth again, then the one after that will likely be for the extraction.
		With the hole in my front tooth currently patched, even if just temporarily, eating will be so much more pleasant than it&apos;s been for a while.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="laptop">
	<p>
		As I was mulling over what to do last night and trying to get to sleep, I realised I didn&apos;t need to reinstall the system from scratch.
		What I needed was to edit the configuration files on the hard drive from the live <abbr title="Universal Serial Bus">USB</abbr> system.
		Or even better, swap the hard drive into the working machine and edit the configuration files from there.
		As it turned out, swapping the hard drive was the only way; the live system option wouldn&apos;t work as I needed to run <code>update-grub</code> after editing them.
		Still though, it didn&apos;t work.
		The system still crashes when booting.
		I decided to try to reinstall Ubuntu, the system that came on the machine.
		If successful, I&apos;d try to get the recycling centre to do an exchange.
		There might be a reason this machine had Ubuntu when the rest of the Linux systems they sell have Mint.
		Maybe Ubuntu has certain tweaks that make it work, while the machine Mint is on will play nicer.
		If the installation failed though, I&apos;m out a bunch of money.
		I can&apos;t return a computer I messed up.
		I&apos;d have to find a way to make Debian work on it, if even possible.
		Even if I got it working with Ubuntu though, there&apos;s a chance the recycling centre won&apos;t take it back.
	</p>
	<p>
		I set the download to start before running errands for the day, but it wasn&apos;t complete by the time I needed to head to work.
		I figured it&apos;d be done by the time I got off, then I could pull a late-nighter to get the system installed and head out early to return the laptop.
		It wasn&apos;t going to be fun.
		To make matters worse, I seem to have forgotten to plug my laptop in before heading out.
		I came home to find it dead.
		Thankfully, the <abbr title="International Organisation for Standardisation">ISO</abbr> download had completed by the time the computer ran out of power.
		Just as thankfully, Canonical provides checksums for their disk images, so I was able to know for sure the download had completed.
		Otherwise, completed or not, I&apos;d have to assume the file to be partial and throw it out, starting over.
		Firefox, after all, had no record that the download had even occurred, let alone whether it had completed successfully or not.
		I think most Linux distributors provide checksums, either to detect tampering, detect broken files, or both.
		Like the Debian installer, the Ubuntu installer seemed to run just fine on the machine.
		But would the installed system work correctly, or would it crash like Debian does?
		I also forgot to put the old Wi-Fi card back into the machine before installing.
		Would that prevent the proprietary firmware needed to use the thing from getting installed?
		I&apos;d have to wait and find out.
		Either way would be a gamble.
		I could risk continuing to run the installer all for nothing, or I could risk aborting unnecessarily and wasting time that&apos;d already passed.
	</p>
	<p>
		The Ubuntu install was much, much faster than the Debian installs; the reason for this being that the Ubuntu drive needed to be unencrypted for the next user, and I always encrypt my Debian drives.
		That meant the drive didn&apos;t need to be overwritten to avoid metadata leaks; all the data, meta and otherwise, is just in cleartext.
		It&apos;s so not secure, but it&apos;s the state the recycling centre sells them in.
		They&apos;re pushing hardware reuse after all, not encryption.
		They want the machines to be as easy to get started on as possible.
	</p>
	<p>
		The good news was that Ubuntu didn&apos;t crash, and booted normally.
		The bad news was that the Wi-Fi didn&apos;t work.
		The other good news was that reinstalling the system fixed the Wi-FI issue.
		Being a much quicker install (at the cost of being a much less <strong>*secure*</strong> install), it wasn&apos;t even much hassle.
		I simply worked on journaling in the mean time.
		Tomorrow won&apos;t be fun.
		I&apos;ve taken too many trips to Eugene lately, and my knees are sore.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Wi-Fi">
	<h2>Wi-Fi hardware</h2>
	<p>
		I&apos;m tired of not having the Wi-Fi cards I need.
		The Debian wiki claims that <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi"><q cite="https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi">For Mini PCIe all cards with an Atheros chipset are supported.</q></a>.
		That seems easy enough, so I bought an Atheros Wi-Fi card online.
		When it arrives, I&apos;ll see if it actually functions.
		If so, I might grab a couple more.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="meta">
	<h2>Website maintenance</h2>
	<p>
		Right as I was headed out again, this time to schedule an appointment with a regular medical doctor, my mother wrote to me.
		So I waited for a response to my response to her, and worked on cleaning the website while I waited.
		<em>*sigh*</em>
		Today was not a good day for this, there&apos;s too much to get done.
		It turned out she was in the area and was going to drop by for a visit, but it&apos;d been over half an hour with no response from her.
		I had to leave before she happened to drop by, and I didn&apos;t know she was coming.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve decided to stop holding back in my coursework.
		I operate in <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>, which offers quite a number of features.
		However, the university website strips out some of those features.
		I&apos;ve been trying to tailor my work to work best with the school&apos;s system, so I&apos;ve been refraining from using things such as internal document links, as the university strips <code>id</code> attributes, instead marking everything up with their own, random-looking <code>id</code>s.
		I&apos;m done caring.
		The archived copy is now the important thing.
		Anything allowable in <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> goes.
		If it doesn&apos;t work with the university&apos;s system, too bad.
	</p>
	<p>
		I was planning to finish the <code>id</code> update today.
		Really I was.
		However, there was too much that took away my time.
		It didn&apos;t work out.
		For example, some of these pages <del>are</del> <ins>were</ins> a royal mess.
		Cleaning them up not only drains my time, but my energy.
		I&apos;m down to two pages though.
		Just two more pages, and the <code>id</code>s will play nicely with the <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>.
	</p>
	<p>
		Along the way, I ran into some assignments that involved goal-setting.
		Most of the goals I set probably still apply, though I&apos;m not quite organised enough to work on them at the moment.
		The hilarious part to me though is that the school is censoring me, making it highly difficult for me to check this information.
		The information&apos;s still in my reach, but it&apos;s prohibitively difficult for me to frequently peruse.
		They probably wanted me to set the goals to actively keep them in sight, but in an ironic twist, they&apos;ve made it prohibitively difficult to actually keep the goals in sight and work toward them.
		Isn&apos;t censorship great?
		If I wanted, I could make a copy of the information and format it into its usable version, keeping that copy in a private location, but what would be the point from my perspective?
		If the school wants this hidden from the rest of the world, it can remain mostly-hidden from me as well.
		If I remember, I&apos;ll take a look again in 2023.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="medical">
	<h2>Medical check-up</h2>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve gotten a medical check-up scheduled now.
		They&apos;ll see me next month on the twelfth, at 11:20.
		I don&apos;t expect it to be eventful.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="driving">
	<h2>Learning to drive</h2>
	<p>
		A while back, one of my shift leaders offered to teach me to drive.
		I decided today to take them up on the offer, and ask if it was still open.
		They&apos;re probably my favourite shift leader, they&apos;d already offered, and they&apos;re in no way scary, but I was still a bit nervous to ask.
		I nearly allowed myself to put it off for now, waiting until next month or so to ask about helping me at around April, but decided it was best to ask as early as possible.
		Sure enough, they&apos;re still willing, and as expected, they&apos;re busy this month on such short notice.
		We can&apos;t begin now anyway.
		They say April will be fine, though now that I&apos;m home to check a calendar, it looks like my between-terms period starts a few days before that and is only thirteen days long.
		And that&apos;s if I get my exams taken as soon as possible; otherwise, the gap&apos;ll be even shorter.
		I might have to run the lessons into the terms, shortening the time I have to work on coursework during the week.
		Joy.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="gender">
	<h2>Man in the house</h2>
	<p>
		As the head manager headed out, we had a brief little exchange.
		I won&apos;t provide a commentary, but I found it amusing.
	</p>
	<p>
		&quot;Watch after these girls, you&apos;re the only man in the house.&quot;
	</p>
	<p>
		&quot;I&apos;m not a man.&quot;
	</p>
	<p>
		&quot;Close enough.&quot;
	</p>
</section>
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			If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
			My address is in the source comments near the top of this document.
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